Russia Ukraine conflict: The case for atmanirbharta

The Russia Ukraine conflict has exposed that the world is not flat, and there is no global village. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

The war in Ukraine marks the end of “globalization” as we know it. I put that word within quote marks because it’s not just another English word, like the ones we try to crack every day on Wordle. It is a term that was invented with a specific meaning and intent and has been vigorously promoted for the last 30 years.

No sane person can feel anything but horror for the plight of Ukrainians as Russia pounds the country into submission. But we should also try to figure out the bigger picture and the lessons we should learn from what has been going on. Especially those of us who do not live in North America or the European Union—the “West”.

It is suddenly clear (if anyone had any doubts about it) that for all the talk of a “global community”, racism never died. The world has seen many wars over the last two decades. In fact, right now, even as you read this, Yemen is being bombed into the Stone Age (and this has been going on for the last seven years), and Syrian families are risking their lives trying to escape the civil war, now into its 11^th year. Very few even know; no one really cares; journalists and commentators have lost interest. And the Ukraine war has suddenly brought every Western media establishment bias out into the open.

These are some of the comments correspondents made on leading Western news channels:

“This isn't Iraq or Afghanistan...This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city!”

“We are in the 21st century, we are in a European city and we have cruise missile fire as though we were in Iraq or Afghanistan, can you imagine?”

"They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts... War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”

“The unthinkable has happened...This is not a developing, third world nation; this is Europe!”

“These are Christians, they're white. They're very similar (to us).”

The journalists saying these things on air were quite possibly not even conscious how racist they were being. And that’s even more dangerous. When you meet a white neo-Nazi thug, you at least know what he stands for, and he himself is aware of his beliefs.

The narrative, too, has been extremely one-sided. Russian media has been thoroughly de-platformed. YouTube has blocked Russian news channels. Google is censoring search results about Russia and the war. Facebook has clamped down on pro-Putin opinion. Never before has the so-called free world been deprived to this extent of full information, non-partisan analysis and the “other point of view”. For years, people who see themselves as liberals and democrats have railed against the firewalls that China erected around what its citizens are allowed to know, banning media like Facebook, Google, Twitter and The New York Times. But today, we who don’t live in China are also being firewalled and our access to information and different opinions is being cut off and most of us don’t even realize it.

Also read: Reddit bans users from posting links to Russia-based entities

So we are flooded with fake news. Hundreds of Russian tanks destroyed (not true). Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in combat gear at the frontlines (a photograph from last year). Videos of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv being bombed by Russian aircraft (a chemical plant explosion seven years ago in China). Every Ukrainian soldier on Snake Island laying down his life and fighting till his last breath (the soldiers surrendered and are being treated as prisoners of war as per the Geneva Convention). Ukrainian fighter pilots taking down Russian jets (from a video game).

Let me repeat that I do not support war and am horrified by what Ukrainians must be going through. The point I wish to make is different. Our knowledge about the world today is to a large extent controlled by a handful of Western media organizations, which trumpet their liberal values and claim to have zero-tolerance policies on misinformation. Yet, right now, they are acting as political instruments. I am certain that currently, common Russians have no access to any information that is not approved by Vladimir Putin and his men. But Putin’s Russia is an autocracy which scorns human rights and freedoms. We expect no better from it. Russians know this too. But when powerful corporations in the democratic world turn into propagandists for the countries where they are headquartered, it should worry us.

There is much talk currently about Russian oligarchs alleged to be close to Putin. But are there any oligarchs in the world that are more powerful than these giant media corporations which control what we get into know and what opinions we form?

Russia has been subjected to economic sanctions by the West on a scale unprecedented in history. But some other bans violate every freedom that the West claims to stand for and punish Russians rather than Russia. Singers are not allowed to participate in European music contests. Russian football clubs and players are being thrown out of European leagues. Chess player Alexander Grischuk has been barred from a forthcoming tournament in Norway, despite being a critic of the war.

Valery Gergiev, arguably the greatest living music conductor, and a supporter of Vladimir Putin, has been sacked by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra (he was its chief conductor) when he refused to comply with his employer’s demand to “distance himself unambiguously and unapologetically from the brutal war of aggression which Putin is leading against Ukraine”.

Long-dead pre-Communist-era Russian religious philosophers are being removed from philosophy courses. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels were taken off the syllabus by a university in Italy (and then put back on as the university backtracked). Federation Internationale Feline, an international cat fancier society, has announced that no cat bred in Russia may be imported or exhibited in any of its shows.

It is said that during the First World War, the British public booed and threw stones at dachshunds because of the dogs’ German pedigree. The West has regressed to that stage.

What about the economic sanctions?

One, the accepted rule for international sanctions is that they come with conditions—stop doing A, B and C, and we will be back to business as usual. But the current sanctions make no mention of what Russia is expected to do to get these lifted. For Putin, this means that there is no guarantee at all that even if he calls his troops back home, he will gain anything.

Two, these sanctions hurt 140 million Russian people more than they hurt Putin and his cronies. However, that may be unavoidable.

Three, when Germany and France unilaterally seize super-yachts owned by Russian billionaires and Russian cargo ships without the semblance of due process, even the biggest oligarch-haters, upon reflection, may wonder which trash-can the liberal democratic concept of sanctity of private property has been dumped in.

Four, the overnight cutting-off of Russia from SWIFT, the platform for cross-border banking transactions, makes it amply clear to one and all that these basic global systems are owned by the West and can be weaponized as and when it pleases.

Five—and what will possibly change the non-Western world’s thinking permanently—the freezing of the foreign currency reserves of the Russian Central Bank (RCB) destroys one of the key foundational premises of the global trade and financial norms and structures.

If, in one stroke of the pen, a sovereign nation can be denied access to its own money, then the whole edifice of modern commerce and investment begins to look as fragile and uncertain as the Gurgaon apartment building whose roof collapsed suddenly last month, killing two people and forcing all its inhabitants to abandon their homes. Think of this—China owns more than a trillion dollars of US treasury bonds. This is seen as both safe and sound investment, and leverage for China over the US. But what the RCB sanction means is that the US has abrogated to itself the power to just deny repayment and make the investment vanish. This flouts all accepted versions of international law.

Whatever the outcome of the Ukraine war, it will end up changing the world in some fundamental ways. For a country like India, it becomes absolutely imperative now to develop its own indigenous systems and infrastructures that are immune to international bullying. The videos of crowds of helpless Russians at Moscow metro stations, unable to use Apple Pay and Google Pay to buy their tickets because the banks to which these US payment modes are linked have been sanctioned, should make us doubly grateful that we have tools like UPI and RuPay. And it becomes even more essential that we grow our economy as quickly and fairly as possible.

For China, as an American columnist put it succinctly, the Ukraine war and the West’s response to it is a “dry run”, “an invaluable case study” of how the West could react if China did something audacious, like occupy Taiwan. For years now, Beijing has been working to armour the Chinese economy against Western sanctions, and will now have a much better idea of how to go about it.

Of course, China is no Russia; it is a giant economy, the world’s largest consumer market and the manufacturing hub of the world. For instance, Apple has stopped selling its products in Russia and Apple Maps now shows Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, as part of Ukraine. It is extremely unlikely that Tim Cook will be as brave if China turns militarily aggressive—after all, nearly all iPhones, iPads and iPods are assembled in China.

But for the broader non-Western world, the lessons from the ongoing conflict are clear:

One, the world is not flat, as proclaimed by Western globalization cheerleaders for decades now. The US and the West control much of the terrain and much of the plumbing underneath. They have the power to turn many of the taps off and shut many of the valves and will use this power when it suits them.

Two, there is no global village. There is the West and there are the rest of us. Call it racism, call it a limited worldview, call it whatever, but that’s the way it is.

Three, the rules of the much-hyped “international rules-based order” are made by the West. And there is no court of appeals.

Four, every nation which “the rest of us” are citizens of is on its own. Expect little or no help from the West in a time of crisis. Even Ukraine is belatedly discovering this, as NATO has made it clear that it will not provide soldiers and refuses the make the country a no-fly zone. It is the Ukrainians who have to fight their war on the ground and die.

Let me repeat once more that I do not support the war and cannot even begin to imagine what innocent Ukrainians are suffering. But we will also be fools to be in denial about the true face of “globalization” that this war has torn the veils off.